How Fuel efficient is your car?

[BAS]

Heck, now that the snow has mostly melted, I am planning on going back to my bikes to get to work! Maybe burn some of this fat off in the process. (Between gas prices going up, and paying for parking [& parking tickets] at work, I really don't have a choice.)

[can't sit still]

Kinda cool,

[can't sit still]

"Meanwhile, Congress wants the Pentagon — whose Abrams tanks use six gallons of fuel to travel one mile — to make fuel efficiency a part of its future planning" http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/05/a ... l_051908w/

[Captain Goddammit]

"Meanwhile, Congress wants the Pentagon — whose Abrams tanks use six gallons of fuel to travel one mile — to make fuel efficiency a part of its future planning" http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/05/a ... l_051908w/

Fuel economy isn't the most important design issue with a fighting vehicle. Firepower, performance, and durability while being shot at are.
If you strip off tons of armor and weapons you could get a lot better MPG out of one.
When and how they are used is certainly debatable and has a big effect on fuel usage. Criticizing the bad fuel mileage of a tank shows ignorance about the set of parameters they deal with. War is do-or-die at all costs.
"Hey, we lost the battle and died but we got great gas mileage while doing it!"

[can't sit still]

Goddamit Captain, I was commenting on the mileage. You can interpret that as criticism if you like. I'm well aware of the connection between mileage and weight. I was a Cat skinner until recently.
If we took the money that we spend on the war, we could buy 50 years worth of the oil production from Iraq. Then we wouldn't need 6 gallon to the mile tanks.
I am absolutely fascinated by the advanced weapons of war. But, at the bottom of it all, they're used for killing people who do not threaten our security in any way. They may threaten the security of Israel but, that is of NO consequence to me.

[thirt33n]

I am absolutely fascinated by the advanced weapons of war. But, at the bottom of it all, they're used for killing people who do not threaten our security in any way. They may threaten the security of Israel but, that is of NO consequence to me.

Really? At the bottom of it all huh?
It all comes down to Israel and protecting Israel?

And if say, Honduras pledged to wipe Panama off the face of the earth, would that also be of no consequence to you?

[mdmf007]

I am absolutely fascinated by the advanced weapons of war. But, at the bottom of it all, they're used for killing people who do not threaten our security in any way. They may threaten the security of Israel but, that is of NO consequence to me.

Really? At the bottom of it all huh?
It all comes down to Israel and protecting Israel?

And if say, Honduras pledged to wipe Panama off the face of the earth, would that also be of no consequence to you?

No we would invade Costa Rica instead...

[Intubater69]

Fully electric. Moot point. Ha! Ha ha!

Awww, that's cute.
Now playing devil's advocate for a bit....
How many tons of coal did it take to provide power for that electric car? How much mercury was released into the environment by those coal fired plants to generate the electricty pushed into those batteries? How many gallons of diesel fuel did it take either BNSF or the UP to haul that coal in to the local powerplant? Oh, the local powerplant is nuclear? Are they properly storing those spent fuel rods or do they have a silent problem with tritium leaking into the groundwater like ComEd does outside Chicago? And back to those lead batteries, how many children suffer with lead poisoning from the smelters that are required to make the internal plates for those batteries?

Rob, all of the above is NOT an attack on you, it's the whole electric car thing in general. I'm shooting at the idea, not the messenger.

So, what would be a good alternative then? I have a 75 ml commute RT n so does my wife, in the op direction. And here in the motor city, mass transit is a feeble joke, pathetic comes to mind. I have been considering a motorcycle, or as us paramedics call them, donorcycles.

[theCryptofishist]

I was just reading up on this recently and apparently, while electric cars are not emmission free, they are an improvement.

[gyre]

You have to take into account huge upfront costs.
Also, the inability to travel long distance without long stops.

Petrol cars have not really been pushed for high mileage.
A car built to the light weight of most electric cars will do very well.
Microcars can easily hit 70-100 mpg.
Tesla is doing some very promising things though.

Still, I've been looking into electric bikes and the upfront costs are stunning.
I can't see anything over a few hundred pounds being cost effective now.

http://www.teslamotors.com/
http://www.leftlanenews.com/tesla.htm
http://www.lotuscars.com/
Compare prices
http://www.autosite.com/content/researc ... on/summary

[can't sit still]

Incentive!!! http://www.businessandmedia.org/article ... 45247.aspx

[Ugly Dougly]

I can't see anything over a few hundred pounds being cost effective now.

Yeah, until you try building one yourself.

[mdmf007]

Oils at 133 - only 4 months ago - 100 was a threshhold, now were 33% over that.

ridiculous.

[Apollonaris Zeus]

oIL is skyrocketing because it has been deregulated-

It's the Enron Loophole!

God Fucking Bless GW Bush!

Congress has to take oil off the comodities trading board and regulate it along with electric rates!

AIIZ

[can't sit still]

Zeus, good to see you. It's not quite as simple as "deregulated" Here's a pretty thorough explanation;
Oil Price Mocks Fuel Realities

By F William Engdahl

As business and consumers consider the implications for them of crude oil selling at US$130-plus per barrel, they should bear in mind that, at a conservative calculation, at least 60% of that price comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York Nymex futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or over-the-counter trading to avoid scrutiny (see Speculators knock OPEC off oil-price perch, Asia Times Online, May 6, 2008).

US margin rules of the government's Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex by paying only 6% of the value of the contract. At the present price of around $130 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120.

This extreme "leverage" of 16 to one helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in subprime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population.

The hoax of "peak oil" - namely the argument that oil production has hit the point where more than half all reserves have been used and the world is on the downslope of oil at cheap price and abundant quantity - has enabled this costly fraud to continue since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, with the help of key banks, oil traders and big oil majors.

Washington is trying to shift blame, as always, to Arab oil producers and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The problem is not a lack of crude oil supply. In fact, the world is in over-supply now. Yet the price climbs relentlessly higher. Why? The answer lies in what are clearly deliberate US government policies that permit the unbridled oil price manipulations.

World oil demand flat, prices boom
The chief market strategist for one of the world's leading oil industry banks, David Kelly, of JP Morgan Funds, recently admitted something telling to the Washington Post: "One of the things I think is very important to realize is that the growth in the world oil consumption is not that strong."

One of the stories used to support the oil futures speculators is the allegation that China's demand for imported oil is exploding out of control, driving shortages in the supply-demand equilibrium. Yet the facts do not support the China demand thesis.

The US government's Energy Information Administration (EIA) concluded in its most recent monthly Short Term Energy Outlook report that US oil demand is expected to decline by 190,000 barrels per day (b/d) this year. That is mainly owing to the deepening economic recession.

Chinese consumption, the EIA says, far from exploding, is expected to increase this year by only 400,000 barrels a day. That is hardly the "surging oil demand" blamed on China in the media. Last year, China imported 3.2 million barrels per day, and its estimated usage was around 7 million b/d total. The US, by contrast, consumes around 20.7 million b/d.

That means the key oil-consuming nation, the US, is experiencing a significant drop in demand. China, which consumes only a third of the oil the US does, will see a minor rise in import demand compared with the total daily world oil output of some 84 million barrels, less than half of one percent of total demand.

OPEC has its 2008 global oil demand growth forecast unchanged at 1.2 million barrels per day (mm bpd), as slowing economic growth in the industrialized world is offset by slightly growing consumption in developing nations. OPEC predicts that global oil demand in 2008 will average 87 million bpd, largely unchanged from its previous estimate. Demand from China, the Middle East, India and Latin America is forecast to be stronger, but the European Union and North American demand will be lower.

So the world's largest oil consumer faces a sharp decline in consumption, a decline that will worsen as the housing and related economic effects of the US securitization crisis in finance de-leverages. The price in normal open or transparent markets should presumably be falling not rising. No supply crisis justifies the way the world's oil is being priced today.

Big new oil fields coming online
Not only is there no supply crisis to justify such a price bubble. There are several giant new oil fields due to begin production over the course of 2008 to further add to supply.

The world's single-largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, is finalizing plans to boost drilling activity by a third and increase investments by 40%. Saudi Aramco's plan, which runs from 2009 to 2013, is expected to be approved by the company's board and the Oil Ministry this month. The kingdom is in the midst of a $50 billion oil production expansion plan to meet growing demand in Asia and other emerging markets and is expected to boost its pumping capacity to a total of 12.5 mm bpd by next year, about 11% up from the present capacity of 11.3 mm bpd.

In April this year, Saudi Arabia's Khursaniyah oilfield began pumping and will soon add another 500,000 bpd to world oil supply of high grade Arabian light crude. In addition, the country's Khurais oilfield development, the largest of Saudi Aramco's projects, will boost the production capacity of Saudi oilfields from 11.3 million bpd to 12.5 million bpd by 2009. Khurais is planned to add another 1.2 million bpd of high-quality Arabian light crude to Saudi Arabia's export capacity.

Brazil's Petrobras is in the early phase of exploiting newly confirmed oil reserves offshore in its Tupi field that could be as great or greater than the North Sea. Petrobras says the new ultra-deep Tupi field could hold as much as 8 billion barrels of recoverable light crude. When online in a few years it is expected to put Brazil among the world's "top 10" oil producers, between Nigeria and those of Venezuela.

In the US, aside from rumors that the big oil companies have been deliberately sitting on vast new reserves in Alaska for fear that the prices of recent years would plunge on over-supply, the US Geological Survey (USGS)recently issued a report that confirmed major new oil reserves in an area called the Bakken, which stretches across North Dakota, Montana and south-eastern Saskatchewan. The USGS estimates up to 3.65 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken.

These are just several confirmations of large new oil reserves to be exploited. Iraq, where the Anglo-American Big Four oil majors are salivating to get their hands on unexplored fields, is believed to hold oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia while much of the world has yet to be explored for oil. At prices above $60 a barrel huge new potentials become economic. The major problem faced by Big Oil is not finding replacement oil but keeping the lid on world oil finds in order to maintain present exorbitant prices. Here they have some help from Wall Street banks and the two major oil trade exchanges - Nymex and London-Atlanta's ICE and ICE Futures.

Then why do prices still rise?
There is growing evidence that the recent speculative bubble in oil, which has gone asymptotic since January, is about to pop. Late last month, in Dallas, Texas, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists held its annual conference, with major oil executives and geologists present. According to one participant, knowledgeable oil industry chief executives reached the consensus that "oil prices will likely soon drop dramatically and the long-term price increases will be in natural gas".

Just a few days earlier, Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank, had said that the current oil price bubble was coming to an end. Michael Waldron, the bank's chief oil strategist, was quoted in Britain's Daily Telegraph on April 24 saying, "Oil supply is outpacing demand growth. Inventories have been building since the beginning of the year."

In the US, stockpiles of oil climbed by almost 12 million barrels in April according to the May 7 EIA monthly report on inventory, up by nearly 33 million barrels since January. At the same time, MasterCard's May 7 US gasoline report showed that gas demand has fallen by 5.8%. And refiners are reducing their refining rates dramatically to adjust to the falling gasoline demand. They are now running at 85% of capacity, down from 89% a year ago, in a season when production is normally 95%. The refiners today are clearly trying to draw down gasoline inventories to bid gasoline prices up. "It's the economy, stupid," to paraphrase Bill Clinton's infamous 1992 election quip to daddy Bush. It's called economic recession.

The May 8 report from Oil Movements, a British company that tracks oil shipments worldwide, shows that oil in transit on the high seas is also quite strong. Almost every category of shipment is running higher than it was a year ago. The report notes that, "In the West, a big share of any oil stock building done this year has happened offshore, out of sight." Some industry insiders say the global oil industry from the activities and stocks of the Big Four to the true state of tanker and storage and liftings, is the most secretive industry in the world with the possible exception of the narcotics trade.

Goldman Sachs again in the middle
The oil price today, unlike 20 years ago, is determined behind closed doors in the trading rooms of giant financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank or UBS. The key exchange in the game is the London ICE Futures Exchange (formerly the International Petroleum Exchange). ICE Futures is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Atlanta Georgia International Commodities Exchange. ICE in Atlanta was founded in part by Goldman Sachs, which also happens to run the world's most widely used commodity price index, the GSCI, which is over-weighted to oil prices.

As I noted in my earlier article, ICE was the focus of a recent congressional investigation. It was named both in the Senate's Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations' June 27, 2006, Staff Report and in the House Committee on Energy and Commerce's hearing in December 2007, which looked into unregulated trading in energy futures.

Both studies concluded that the energy price climb to $128 and beyond is driven by billions of dollars' worth of oil and natural gas futures contracts being placed on the ICE. Through a convenient regulation exception granted by the George W Bush administration in January 2006, the ICE Futures trading of US energy futures is not regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), even though the ICE Futures US oil contracts are traded in ICE affiliates in the US. And at Enron's request, the CFTC exempted the over-the-counter oil futures trades in 2000.

So it is no surprise to see in a May 6 report from Reuters that Goldman Sachs announces oil could in fact be on the verge of another "super spike", possibly taking oil as high as $200 a barrel within the next six to 24 months. That headline, "$200 a barrel!" became the major news story on oil for the next two days. How many gullible lemmings followed behind with their money bets?

Arjun Murti, Goldman Sachs' energy strategist, blamed what he called "blistering" (sic) demand from China and the Middle East, combined with his assertion that the Middle East is nearing its maximum ability to produce more oil. "Peak oil" mythology again helps Wall Street. The degree of unfounded hype reminds one of the self-serving Wall Street hype in 1999-2000 around dot.com stocks or Enron.

In 2001, just before the dot.com crash in the NASDAQ, some Wall Street firms were pushing the sale to the gullible public of stocks that their companies were quietly dumping. Or they were pushing dubious stocks for companies where their affiliated banks had a financial interest. In short, as later came out in Congressional investigations, companies with a vested interest in a certain financial outcome used the media to line their pockets and that of their companies, leaving the public investor holding the bag.

It would be interesting for Congress to subpoena the records of the futures positions of Goldman Sachs and a handful of other major energy futures players to see if they are invested to gain from a further rise in oil to $200, not forgetting that 16 to one leverage with which a hedge fund or bank can buy oil futures.

We are hit with an endless series of plausible arguments for the high price of oil: a "terrorism risk premium", a "blistering" rise in demand of China and India; unrest in the Nigerian oil region; oil pipelines' blown up in Iraq; possible war with Iran ... And above all the hype about peak oil. Oil speculator T Boone Pickens has reportedly raked in a huge profit on oil futures and argues, conveniently, that the world is on the cusp of "peak oil". So does the Houston investment banker and friend of Vice President Dick Cheney, Matt Simmons.

As noted in the June 2006 US Senate report, The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices, "There's a few hedge fund managers out there who are masters at knowing how to exploit the peak oil theories and hot buttons of supply and demand, and by making bold predictions of shocking price advancements to come they only add more fuel to the bullish fire in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy."

Will a Democratic Congress act to change the carefully crafted opaque oil futures markets in an election year and risk bursting the bubble? On May 12, the House Energy and Commerce Committee stated it will look at this issue in June.

F William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (PlutoPress), and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (Global Research, available at www.globalresearch.ca). He may be reached at [email protected].

[gyre]

Wide fluctuations damage exploration and new supply coming on line.

[Apollonaris Zeus]

You want to reel in runaway energy prices. Google the "Enron Loophole" and write your congressman!

AIIZ

[can't sit still]

" Just one fill-up of a 4x4's tank with ethanol uses enough grain to feed one person for a year."
http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 34023.html

[gyre]

Here are a few interesting ideas.
I like the idea of using regenerative damping for shocks.
It could be combined with adjustable damping.
It makes a lot more sense than regenerative braking, depending on cost, of course.
http://www.lotustalk.com/forums/f25/new ... ine-46745/

[mdmf007]

its an easy decision - want ethanol?

choose food or fuel in the US. Unless we change our habits, ethanol as a replacement for oil isnt viable.

[can't sit still]

Most people have heard of "fuel vapor" technology. They use it in the Canadian car, the "Ale" to get 92 MPG. Also, most people have heard of the work of Stan Meyer to use high frequency pulsed current to break down water to hydroxy gas. Stan was killed but Bob Boyce is carrying on with the same technology. Stan's car ran on straight water.
Paul Pantone invented a fuel reactor that works very well. They commited him in Utah. His device is called the GEET. There have been hundreds of replications.
There is a new company that is using both these technologies to produce a device to increase mileage. http://www.preignitioncc.com/miracleproducts/index.htm

[gyre]

I have used water wetter with success, but this may be of interest.
http://www.wizdforums.co.uk/archive/ind ... -2338.html

If I haven't mentioned it, there can be good reasons for not using certain aftermarket air intakes.
Hot air can, sometimes, increase efficiency at the cost of maximum power.
I'm uncertain how this applies to some fuel injection systems though.
This info addresses superchargers, but much of it is relevant anyway.
http://www.kennebell.net/techinfo/gener ... ARNING.pdf

[Kinetik V]

its an easy decision - want ethanol?

choose food or fuel in the US. Unless we change our habits, ethanol as a replacement for oil isnt viable.

Ethanol and corn production is a water sucking environmental disaster. It costs $15K to $20K to drill a well here in Cornland with costs increasing every year as you have to drill deeper to reach a dropping water table. If you pull up Google Earth and look at the landscape out here you'll see more center point pivots than you can count. Each one is fed by a deep well with a minimum 4 inch feed pipe...and unless they subscribe to power control to get a discounted power rate those pivots when turned on run 24x7. That's a lot of electrical load and a massive amount of water being consumed.

So just think...as you consume all the food with high fructose corn syrup in it that you drove to the store in your car that uses E-10 fuel to get you're doing your part to rape the environment! It sucks.

The future will require revisiting the past....electricity is the answer.

[can't sit still]

Kinetic, you won't have to worry too much longer about those wells. The Ogllala aquifer is dropping at the rate of 4 ft a year. Farmers etc are pumping out 27 billion gals a day. It's expected to run dry in a couple of decades.

[Apollonaris Zeus]

US margin rules of the government's Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex by paying only 6% of the value of the contract. At the present price of around $130 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120.


Big new oil fields coming online

The world's single-largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, is finalizing plans to boost drilling activity by a third and increase investments by 40%. '

In April this year, Saudi Arabia's Khursaniyah oilfield began pumping and will soon add another 500,000 bpd to world oil supply of high grade Arabian light crudy.

Brazil's Petrobras is in the early phase of exploiting newly confirmed oil reserves offshore in its Tupi field that could be as great or greater than the North Sea.

In the US, aside from rumors that the big oil companies have been deliberately sitting on vast new reserves in Alaska for fear that the prices of recent years would plunge on over-supply, the US Geological Survey (USGS)recently issued a report that confirmed major new oil reserves in an area called the Bakken, which stretches across North Dakota, Montana and south-eastern Saskatchewan. The USGS estimates up to 3.65 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken.

These are just several confirmations of large new oil reserves to be exploited. Iraq, where the Anglo-American Big Four oil majors are salivating to get their hands on unexplored fields, is believed to hold oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia while much of the world has yet to be explored for oil. \

Then why do prices still rise? \

There is growing evidence that the recent speculative bubble in oil, which has gone asymptotic since January, is about to pop. Late last month, in Dallas, Texas, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists held its annual conference, with major oil executives and geologists present. According to one participant, knowledgeable oil industry chief executives reached the consensus that "oil prices will likely soon drop dramatically and the long-term price increases will be in natural gas".

Just a few days earlier, Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank, had said that the current oil price bubble was coming to an end. Michael Waldron, the bank's chief oil strategist, was quoted in Britain's Daily Telegraph on April 24 saying, "Oil supply is outpacing demand growth. Inventories have been building since the beginning of the year."

In the US, stockpiles of oil climbed by almost 12 million barrels in April according to the May 7 EIA monthly report on inventory, up by nearly 33 million barrels since January. At the same time, MasterCard's May 7 US gasoline report showed that gas demand has fallen by 5.8%. And refiners are reducing their refining rates dramatically to adjust to the falling gasoline demand. They are now running at 85% of capacity, down from 89% a year ago, in a season when production is normally 95%. The refiners today are clearly trying to draw down gasoline inventories to bid gasoline prices up. "It's the economy, stupid," to paraphrase Bill Clinton's infamous 1992 election quip to daddy Bush. It's called economic recession.

The May 8 report from Oil Movements, a British company that tracks oil shipments worldwide, shows that oil in transit on the high seas is also quite strong.

Goldman Sachs again in the middle
The oil price today, unlike 20 years ago, is determined behind closed doors in the trading rooms of giant financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank or UBS. The key exchange in the game is the London ICE Futures Exchange (formerly the International Petroleum Exchange). ICE Futures is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Atlanta Georgia International Commodities Exchange. ICE in Atlanta was founded in part by Goldman Sachs, which also happens to run the world's most widely used commodity price index, the GSCI, which is over-weighted to oil prices.


Both studies concluded that the energy price climb to $128 and beyond is driven by billions of dollars' worth of oil and natural gas futures contracts being placed on the ICE. Through a convenient regulation exception granted by the George W Bush administration in January 2006, the ICE Futures trading of US energy futures is not regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), even though the ICE Futures US oil contracts are traded in ICE affiliates in the US. And at Enron's request, the CFTC exempted the over-the-counter oil futures trades in 2000.

So it is no surprise to see in a May 6 report from Reuters that Goldman Sachs announces oil could in fact be on the verge of another "super spike", possibly taking oil as high as $200 a barrel within the next six to 24 months. That headline, "$200 a barrel!" became the major news story on oil for the next two days. How many gullible lemmings followed behind with their money bets?

Arjun Murti, Goldman Sachs' energy strategist, blamed what he called "blistering" (sic) demand from China and the Middle East, combined with his assertion that the Middle East is nearing its maximum ability to produce more oil. "Peak oil" mythology again helps Wall Street. The degree of unfounded hype reminds one of the self-serving Wall Street hype in 1999-2000 around dot.com stocks or Enron.

In 2001, just before the dot.com crash in the NASDAQ, some Wall Street firms were pushing the sale to the gullible public of stocks that their companies were quietly dumping. Or they were pushing dubious stocks for companies where their affiliated banks had a financial interest. In short, as later came out in Congressional investigations, companies with a vested interest in a certain financial outcome used the media to line their pockets and that of their companies, leaving the public investor holding the bag.

It would be interesting for Congress to subpoena the records of the futures positions of Goldman Sachs and a handful of other major energy futures players to see if they are invested to gain from a further rise in oil to $200, not forgetting that 16 to one leverage with which a hedge fund or bank can buy oil futures.

Will a Democratic Congress act to change the carefully crafted opaque oil futures markets in an election year and risk bursting the bubble? On May 12, the House Energy and Commerce Committee stated it will look at this issue in June.

Did you hear about the russian oil exec speak about $250 a barrel today?

The way the market is so screwed up when someone hiccups it drives prices overboard.

I hope a few speculators end up like the sub-prime lenders!

People just need to stop driving and take a day off like I have been doing.

NOn essential driving is over, but I want to see more renewable fuels so I don't have to worry if i'm burning the last drop. I noticed that toll income for toll roads have dropped on most toll roads. Don't know if it people saving by driving on non toll roads or just driving less. But the drop means more funding coming from the general budgets instead of toll
revenue. That means higher taxes and toll fees to maintain the roads.\

AIIZ

[gyre]

Same as enron, they'll break some energy companies and pull the money out of the system for good.
Any system can be corrupted when it's allowed.
Tulip bulbs will soon be $50 each.

They call it shilling in auctions and it's illegal most places.
Ebay just removed the protections from this practice.

[can't sit still]

Watch it buddy !!! I'll give you bad feedback. I just sold a truck on ebay. The guy never payed. My only options now are to leave positive feedback or leave feedback later. I'm thrilled as shit to see political correctness is spreading it's umbrella even further.
Congress is set to let subsidies for wind and solar power expire december. They are going to continue subsidies for petroleum.
How nice!!

[can't sit still]

The Tesla car is putting batteries into top end electric cars. Now hydrogen is making the same move; http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/06/04 ... car-plans/
Hydrogen can be easily produced at point-of-use. It just can't be stored or transported easily or cheaply. GOV pays lip-service to energy independence but can't stand the idea of individual energy production. Central control and central taxing is what makes GOV powerful.
Hydrogen power has been around for a long time; http://www.rexresearch.com/andersnh/andersnh.htm
When the last drop of oil is gone, then GOV will discover, scalar energy, wind power, solar power, biomass, hydrogen, etc.
Dan

[gyre]

Is anyone else preheating their fuel line?
I talked to someone who is running their line near the radiator with a bypass at 100 degrees, so it's a fairly conservative setup.
They are not preheating the intake air.

[can't sit still]

More good news;